Another new crustacean species discovered on the continental slope off Mauritania
The unexplored continental slope off Mauritania is becoming a source of species new to science. Zootaxa (a New Zealander journal) published in March a new paper on hermit crabs from deep Mauritanian waters. It is a comprehensive 40-page publication, with a large and painstaking iconography mainly pe...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2015 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/329100 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/329100 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Centro Oceanográfico de Vigo description Pesquerías New species hermit-crabs deep-sea Mauritania |
| Sumario: | The unexplored continental slope off Mauritania is becoming a source of species new to science. Zootaxa (a New Zealander journal) published in March a new paper on hermit crabs from deep Mauritanian waters. It is a comprehensive 40-page publication, with a large and painstaking iconography mainly performed using a stereomicroscope and image treatment techniques. The paper describes 13 species of hermit crabs belonging to families Diogenidae, Paguridae and Parapaguridae, including one species new to science. All specimens were collected at 83 of the 316 trawl stations conducted over the deep shelf and the continental slope off Mauritania during the four Maurit surveys, developed by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) in the area between 2007 and 2010. Three specimens (one male and two females) of a new species, named Paguristes candelae, were collected at three different stations along the continental slope of Mauritania between 376 and 574-m depth (see map). Besides the description of the new species, the publication also proposes two genus transfers; describes for the first time a female specimen of Paguristes marocanus; extends the geographic distribution of two species and the bathymetric range of another three species; and records for the first time the presence of three hermit crabs in Mauritanian waters. Although 19th late century researchers Milne-Edwards and Bouvier already described the fauna of hermit crabs from Northwest Africa, and Monod gave in 1933 a list of the Mauritanian decapods, this is the first paper exclusively focussed on Mauritanian hermit crabs. To date, the specimens gathered during the four Maurit surveys constitute the most significant collection of these decapods ever captured in the study area. The paper results from more than a year of meticulous taxonomic identification of the Northwest African benthic collections carried out by the researchers of the IEO and the Faculty of Marine Sciences (Vigo University, Spain) jointly working within the framework of the ECOAFRIK project. |
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